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When Ed Walker talks about service and reliability, people listen. He spent 11 years designing power supplies for Compaq, and for the past two years, he's worked in technical support for Texas Instruments.

A year and a half ago, Walker says, he had nothing but respect for his former employer. In fact, in January 2002, he spent $2,500 on a Compaq Presario, complete with Bose speakers and a Lexmark ink jet printer. Today, his opinion has changed. Walker, 45, vows he'll "never buy another Compaq product again."

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Three months after its purchase, the Presario's monitor quit working. "The screen was nothing but black," says Walker, who works out of his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Compaq soon sent a replacement monitor, but about nine months later, the machine itself started malfunctioning. It would often freeze up when he turned it on. Within a few weeks, it wouldn't boot at all.

When he called Compaq, the support rep refused to help, saying his one-year warranty had expired. "Sure enough," Walker remembers, "it had expired the week before." After exchanging a few e-mails with an old friend at Compaq, he persuaded the company to repair the machine, but a few weeks later, the picture on his replacement monitor started to blur. Then his system quit booting again. Finally he gave up, attaching his speakers and printer to a $600 no-name PC from a local shop.

Walker's story is one of more than 18,000 we've collected in our 16th annual Service and Reliability Survey. These stories and the reader survey results that go with them provide insights into how the products you buy are likely to take the knocks and dings of a lifetime of use, and whether the companies that built those products will be there when you need help.

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